"I wish there was a way to know you're in the good old days before you've actually left them" -Andy Bernard
Quentin Tarantino certainly made his mark on cinema when he made his debut in the 1990s with Reservoir Dogs (a remake of City on Fire). Since then, he's made movies heavily influenced by the likes of Lady Snowblood, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! The Dirty Dozen and The Thing. He has recently gone on record as saying "The current era of filmmaking, along with the 1950s and 1980s, is one of the worst in Hollywood history"
I would say that I don't agree with QT. This year has been a pretty good year for films released in the UK, going by those that I have seen. We’ve seen new offerings from some great directors operating in the mainstream. In fact, this could be a golden age of directors, on par with the 1970s
Paul Thomas Anderson, Kathryn Bigelow, Yorgos Lanthimos, Ryan Coogler, Danny Boyle, Spike Lee, Alex Garland, David Cronenberg, Steven Soderbergh (x2), Mike Leigh, Benny Safdie, Bong Joon-ho and Robert Eggers have all produced interesting, compelling and thoughtful movies
With more to come from the mercurial Lynne Ramsay, the talented Park Chan-wook and the singular Guillermo del Toro the rest of 2025 looks like having rich pickings.
Foremost in the 2025 cinematic output are three films: One Battle After Another, A House of Dynamite and Bugonia. Each film different from the other, each film with compelling female performances and each film with the signature of their director firmly imprinting.
Many of this years movies have featured inventive stories and a resurgence of a non formulaic approach. That established directors are being given a bit more artistic freedom is also encouraging and maybe the streaming platforms (that, should be the enemy) that are broadcasting their films soon after release are inadvertanty allowing that freedom from the law of the box office.
What we are seeing, I think, is an increasing interest in experiencing movies in their natural habitat, a growth in quality directors showing individuality to counter the blockbuster superhero trend. There is also a rise in independent films getting exposure and the popularity of foreign language films (and TV). As cynical as I am about a great deal of popular culture I do believe that this year has, so far, been a positive year for cinema and,the year ahead looks promising. Who knows, one day we may look back on this time as "the good old days"
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having said that;